If you meet the Buddha

The most violent line in Zen is a warning about souvenirs.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Chapter 12 of 12 in The masters were funny

Linji, the ninth century Chinese master the Rinzai school is named after, told his monks that if they met the Buddha they should kill him. Meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. He includes your parents in the list, which is how you know he is not talking about people.

It is the line that gets printed on posters, usually by people who like the sound of it, and it works as the last chapter here because it comes for everything in the eleven before it.

What Linji is going after is the souvenir. You have a moment where something opens, and the mind, which is a museum curator, immediately builds a small exhibit around it: the teacher who caused it, the phrase that triggered it, the tradition it belongs to, the person you now are for having had it. That exhibit is a Buddha on the road. Every time you meet it you stop and look, and looking at it is not the thing that happened.

So kill it. Not the person, the figure in your head that stands between you and the plain fact of the moment you are in.

Which means, if the line is honest, it comes for the eleven stories too. The mullah under the streetlamp, the overflowing cup, the man with the trunk on his head. If they become a set of positions I hold, an aesthetic, a shelf, then I have collected twelve Buddhas and I am further away than when I started, with better anecdotes.

I notice I do not want to do this. The stories are lovely. Having read them feels like progress, and the feeling of progress is exactly what Linji is telling his monks to put down.

The jokes were never the teaching. They are the sound something makes when it is knocked out of your hands.